Limitless Worlds

Sunday, March 22, 2015

I've been helping Blacky the Blackball with this game for a few months. It is a neo-clone of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, and it is super awesome. I also did some writing for it: read up the Age of Rebirth and CAPES settings included in the book to see!

This game is really awesome and is probably my current favorite superhero game. Please check it out and give Blacky lots of love and errata suggestions

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Basically, there were
these 21 chaotic gods named the Arcana that got bored of being so
godlike in the ether of nothing, so they created all of reality, called
the Manifest, and the multiverse as well, called the Fabric. They
suffused every living thing with Mana, the energy of the cosmos, thus
bestowing souls upon the recipients. So in this setting, magic is your
soul

The Arcana turned away for, like, six seconds,
only to come back to basically find the Manifest boiling over. Turns
out, the Arcana are way too chaotic to properly hold together reality.

So
they created the Reversed, 21 gods that served as the mirror images to
the Arcana. And that basically fixed everything for at least a while.
Turns out, the Reversed were just as powerful and willful as the Arcana,
just in different ways.

So as a contingency, the
Arcana made the Tarot, enlightened champions pulled from all across the
Manifest and the Fabric, to serve as their watchdogs. They created the
fey-like Cups, the robotic Pentacles, the demonic Wands and the ghostly
Swords. They also chose certain humans as chosen sons, naming them Fools
because of their unwritten destiny.

The world became pretty alright, except eventually the Reversed noticed that the Arcana and their Tarot champions were getting all the recognition. So the Reversed made their own Tarot in secret, calling them the Trump.

One night, hell broke loose as the Trumps were released across the Manifest and the Fabric, striking down the Tarot, their great works, and killing hundreds of thousands (if not millions). Reality descended once again into anarchy, but the Tarot were too weak to do anything except regain strength.

Eventually, though, the Tarot did regain strength. Though small in number, champions have arisen throughout the Manifest who have started to destroy high ranking Trumps and restore civilization to what it once was. Many people herald this time as the beginning of the fabled Age of Rebirth

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Thought I'd do a little more brainstorming regarding the setting, and so I've decided to detail the Gondwana region, which correlates to the deserts of southeast Washington.

Gondwana was supposedly once a hot and humid place, much like the Quon Jungle to the west. Here, the race of reptilian alchemists and scholars known as the Scaled ruled during the Age of Ignis. After having driven out the Formless, promethean creatures of chaos, the Scaled built up their own empire amongst the jungles and marshes, constructing stone citadels and carving their likeness into their buildings.

However, near the end of the Age of Ignis, a massive earthquake struck Olympia, and once the shaking subsided, the Barrier Mountains loomed to the west. Soon the moisture was sucked out of Gondwana, leaving the footlands of the mountains arid at best, with the Dune Sea encroaching from the east.

This only compounded problems for the Scaled, whose bloodlust had resulted in a decades long civil war. This provided a perfect chance for the Fey, the Children of Aqua, the sweep down from the north and break the Scaled, ushering in the Age of Aqua.

But during the current Age of Terra, Gondwana has taken on a much different appearance. To the southeast is the Dune Sea, a vast desert that has all-but-consumed the old Scaled civilization. Plowing across the desert is the city-state of Iram, The City of a Thousand Silks, built onto the back of a giant beetle that has survived since the Age of Terrors. Iram marches throughout Gondwana, offering trade to all they come to.

To the north, the land cools slightly as it approaches the First Forest Range, becoming a land of praries and savannahs. Called the Ivory Plains, it is dotted with minor tribes who did not swear allegiance to Ai. They are a nomadic people who ride strange beasts seen nowhere else.

West lies the Steplands, strange foothills of the Barrier Mountains that are geometric and cubic in shape. Few live here, but many see it as a place of arcane power. In the northeastern Steplands sits the Valley of Bones, a massive graveyard where the skeletons of creatures beyond imagining made their final resting place. In the largest skeleton is built Ai, the City of Ten Tribes, who pride themselves in both their battle prowess and their social progressiveness.

Finally, southwest the Steplands grow up into the Bleeding Mountains, a volcanic area of the Barrier Mountains that is believed to hold an entrance to the underworld. Built in the face of one of these mountains is Agartha, the Bronze Metropolis. Famed for their advanced technology and hardy lifestyle, Agarthans have their eyes on expanding their empire throughout Olympia.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

I was thinking recently how much I love expansive settings in fantasy. I love kitchen sink settings; I like exploring India, Mesoamerica, Germany and so on, allowing characters and locations of all stripes.

However, I hate how large those settings are. They are just too massive; it could literally take in game months to travel to another country, or even real life months. I ain't got time for that. I like condensed settings size wise, but the problem is they generally aren't too diverse.

So I decided to make my own, and instead of a map, I'm using one that exists: the good ol' state of Washington.

"That's dumb," you may say. But to that I say "No!". Washington is the US state with the most varied terrain, the only state in the lower 48 with a rainforest AND its a perfect size for a campaign setting (70k square miles). Characters could walk from west to east in roughly 10 days, but they would pass through mountains, swamps, forests and deserts to do it.

I also have started to become quite fond of Swords and Sorcery, Lost World type settings. I love the forbidden magic, the dark gods, and the epic stories. I'm cribbing from Primeval Thule, where this Washington was real but was destroyed as the glaciers crept in during the last Ice Age.

There are no countries, but 13 city states, each with their own cultural flavor. For example, Agartha is built into primeval, extremely active Mt. Saint Helens, and is based on Greco-Roman and Mesopotamian civilizations. On the other hand, Hyperboria is built high in the Cascades near the Great Glacier, and they are extremely Norse, Scandinavian and Russian influenced.

I'm debating what system to use for this if I run it, but it may either be Blood, Guts and Glory, ACKS, or D&D 5e, or maybe even B&T. If I write this up, which I hope to do, maybe I'll provide mechanics for all those games and more.

Anyway, I'm going to chronicle its creation on here. I'm also gonna go back and work on some of my other "chronicle the setting here" stuff, which I've been slacking on.

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Just a quick recap, I said before that I was writing some settings for the upcoming FASERIP game by Blacky the Blackball (the game rules by the way), and I actually made a last minute change.

Originally, one of my settings was going to be a modified cyberpunk setting, and this one still exists. However, the other was going to be post apocalypse, and while I wrote up a brief for it, it felt way too loose and boring for me to want to put in the game.

So I did a heel turn, and decided instead to write something called Age of Rebirth.

I didn't grow up playing things like Baldur's Gate or Wizardry; my exposure to roleplaying games was Final Fantasy, Tales of Symphonia, Golden Sun, Kingdom Hearts and Shin Megami Tensei. It wasn't boots on the ground soldiers plunging into dangerous dungeons; it was acrobatic warriors screaming out the names of their special attacks as they basically waded through gods like an ankle-high stream.

Age of Rebirth is my answer to want to play such a game on the tabletop. A lot of games try to harp on this style (Exalted, Anima, Weapons of the Gods), and while they aren't bad, they kind of get caught up in their own butts. You will notice that some of the setting harps on Exalted, which is intentional, but I feel like I've made it my own.

The setting will feature magical gear called Instruments, the ability to summon otherwordly creatures, a Limit Break-esque Overdrive, and the ability to manipulate ambient Mana.

A setting summary will come soon, but thought I'd start out with just a light teaser!